Put Tend on a screen in your kitchen.

You do not need to buy anything. An old tablet, a laptop nobody uses, a spare monitor with a small PC behind it. The wall is just a web page.

If you are buying something

A 10 or 11 inch Android tablet is the simplest wall. It has a browser, it can stay plugged in, and it costs less than a monitor. Look for a screen you can read from across the room, a charging port you can leave connected, and nothing else. Speed does not matter. The wall is a web page that refreshes once a minute, so a used or refurbished one is fine. An iPad works the same way.

Add a wall mount, or a stand with a cable channel, so the cord is not the first thing you see.

If you want it flush on the wall with no bezel, a cheap mini PC and a touch monitor is the other route. It costs more and takes an hour instead of ten minutes.

Setting it up

• Open the wall address in the tablet's browser.
• It shows a six-character code. Type that into Tend on your phone, under People, then Screens.
• Make the screen stay on. Turn off the sleep timer, and turn the brightness down at night if it faces a bedroom.
• Hang it where people already walk past.

What the screen can do

It shows the week, the shared lists, the kids' jobs and the board, and it runs a slideshow of your family photographs when nobody has touched it for a few minutes. Anyone can tick a job off or add a note.

It cannot delete anything, cannot approve spending, and cannot see any other household. It is not signed in as you: a screen gets an identity of its own when you pair it, so no adult's account is ever left open on a screen a child can reach. Remove it from your phone and that identity is deleted, so a tablet you sell cannot come back.

It shows names, the week and your photographs to whoever is standing in front of it, and it needs no password to look at. Worth a thought about where you hang it. The privacy policy spells out exactly what a screen can and cannot see.